Yesterday was a double bottling day, four cases of beer, very tedious boring work (did I ever mention how much I dislike bottling?). Fortunately I had my lil’ helper Karen there to keep me company. As the title says, we bottled the Pastime Pale Ale and the Saison.

Once again, impatienceÂ proved to be not be an attribute of the qualities found in a good homebrewer. The PPA was brewed 15 days prior to bottling. For what its original gravity was and what its final gravity was this should have been plenty of time for everything to be ‘all good’. Instead what I was dealing with was a rather hazy/cloudy pale ale that had a slight sulfur flavor to it, I was getting pissy. And instead of racking it to a secondary and giving it another two weeks to help fall clear, I went ahead and bottled it anyway – very amateurish. I’m not overly concerned with the sulfury off flavor, I’ve had that before and it has gone away (though now that I’ve said that . . .), and I’m not overly concerned with the haze as long as it tastes fine, though this may still fall clear. What I AM concerned with is that most likely there will be a considerable amount of sediment in the bottom of the bottles, and this has and will always bother me. The Saison on the other hand was bottled with no problems, looked a lovely color, fell mostly clear, and had a wonderful peppery Belgian flavor – aahhh the difference some patience makes.

I also got my regulator back from being repaired! While I was on my short lived kegging kick earlier in the year I accidentally knocked over my tank and regulator and crushed the gauge that tells you how much gas is left in the tank. The good part about this was I was able to still us the regulator to carbonate my beer and push it through the draft box, the bad part was I had no idea how much gas I had or had left and was pushing the limits each time I tried it. Unbeknown to me that gauge was more of a pain in the butt to get replaced than I had anticipated. The first place I went to told me minimum 1 week turn around. Unfortunately I didn’t have time. Second place was a friend who offered to do it through her work. This, I think, may have been one of those thimes where she wished she would have kept her mouth shut. She had it for about a month with several attempts made to repair it, only to repeatedly be stymied because of a backward threading on the gauge. Sorry about the inconvenience, Heather, but thank you all the same! Now that I know how much gas is left in my tank, guess what, it’s time for a fill. I wonder how much a tank of gas costs . . .

This entry was posted
on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Homebrew.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Bottling the Pastime Pale Ale & the Saison”

Go to G&E Welding Supply off Airport Road and they’ll fill it for like $10-12. I imagine that other places (like Keen Gas) might fill it similarly, provided they don’t try to get you with the “Swap” scam.

“Yes… let us take your pretty new tank and replace it with this crappy been-to-the-bunghole-of-hell-and-back tank…”

I have nothing but good things to say about the boys at G&E. A couple bottles of homebrew go over pretty good with them too.

As far as the gauge goes – if you think it might happen again, get a gauge cage.